Is anyone else curious why the NYT uses Medium? Their own website is literally about reading stuff (Sorry if this is off-topic)
"How we did X" is "not worthy" of the main brand.
Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
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Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#12Is anyone else curious why the NYT uses Medium? Their own website is literally about reading stuff (Sorry if this is off-topic)
It's an engineering blog post, which usually serve double duty as being both informative and also useful for recruiting ("Look at the cool stuff we are building! Come be a part of it!"). Case in point, the post ends with "we’re currently hiring for a variety of roles and career levels".
In addition to not being really appropriate for nytimes.com, I'm guessing that publishing content there brings along a lot of extra cruft that is probably not necessary for a post like this (advertising, paywall system, isolating it from the "real" NYTimes content, etc.). Easier to just throw it up on Medium and call it a day.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t be ridiculous. Google killing a feed reader is a way different from Google killing a cloud service with paying customers and SLA agreements.
This is from their legal agreement: 7.1 Discontinuance of Services. Subject to Section 7.2, Google may discontinue any Services or any portion or feature for any reason at any time without liability to Customer. 7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasona…
Of course they can do it. I’m sure similar language exists in AWS and Azure agreements.
Look, I hate a lot of what Google stands for and where it’s going. But I find it very implausible they’ll kill any non-beta products that are part of google cloud platform. GCP is poised to take the place of AdWords as the google golden goose, helping them to diversify from their heavy reliance on advertising for revenue. They do not want to screw that up.
I’m sure they are well aware of the uprising that would cause amongst developers, aka the core customers of GCP. It would be a stupid move in a highly competitive cloud market, effectively telegraphing the fact that you can not rely on GCP services to exist in perpetuity. Their competitors would likely respond by re-implementing the shut down product with a compatible API so they could literally steal disgruntled users from GCP.
If you’re really concerned about this, the solution is pretty simple: don’t use GCP. If you want to use it, then only rely on the very core services that google clearly has strong incentives not to kill. Those would likely be VMs and any products that have an equivalent at another cloud vendor.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#14Is anyone else curious why the NYT uses Medium? Their own website is literally about reading stuff (Sorry if this is off-topic)
It's an engineering blog post, which usually serve double duty as being both informative and also useful for recruiting ("Look at the cool stuff we are building! Come be a part of it!"). Case in point, the post ends with "we’re currently hiring for a variety of roles and career levels". In addition to not being really appropriate for nytimes.com, I'm guessing that publishing content there brings along a lot of extra…
Bingo.
Our CTO made our first post to Medium explaining the move: https://open.nytimes.com/introducing-the-new-open-blog-23eba...
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#15Doesn't this lead to vendor lock-in? All these Google proprietary services seem like they would be a big issue if they decide for whatever reason to migrate away from GCP.
It’s actually double lock-in, so 2x worse. You used to have to just be afraid of lock-in, which I don’t think is as big an issue as it sometimes seems. But with Google, you’re not only locked in but might be LOCKED OUT when they kill your product.
Silly statement. Google is in the cloud business and this is very different than a free product they offer.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#16Is anyone else curious why the NYT uses Medium? Their own website is literally about reading stuff (Sorry if this is off-topic)
It's an engineering blog post, which usually serve double duty as being both informative and also useful for recruiting ("Look at the cool stuff we are building! Come be a part of it!"). Case in point, the post ends with "we’re currently hiring for a variety of roles and career levels". In addition to not being really appropriate for nytimes.com, I'm guessing that publishing content there brings along a lot of extra…
This is really fascinating to me. Is this because engineers who they want to recruit dislike the New York Times brand, or because readers of the New York Times don't want to read things as informal as transparent blog posts about internal NYT decisions?
It's very easy for me to see something like blog.newyorktimes.com with a similar design / community philosophy as Medium, but would that somehow cheapen the experience for NYT readers? Or does NYT just not see itself as a "hip tech company" like Medium? I have endless questions about this, haha.
It seems to me like there's a lot of unstated assumptions hiding in "not appropriate for nytimes.com". Some things mentioned include -- "advertising, paywall system, isolating it from the "real" NYTimes content, etc.". This is absolutely baffling to me! I would be much more inclined to read regular NYT content were it not for these things.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#17> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action.
That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sending request headers with sixteen kilobytes of tracking data. Maybe that’s the real problem eh?
I wonder which news website has the largest amount of trackers. If I let the CNN home page sit open in chrome, I can come back an hour later and find thousands of requests blocked by uBlock.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#18> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…
If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#19> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…
If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).
It’s not a surprise, but it is a certain kind of schadenfreude to see a bug caused purely by the sheer amount of trackers they’re forcing into their users’ browsers. It might have been a good time for them to do some internal reflection.
And btw it’s not free; there is a paywall and you can subscribe to the NYT.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#20> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…
If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).
OP said it was funny, not that it was a surprise.